India's Hindu holy men threaten a mass suicide over polluted Ganges

Ganges

By Peter Foster in New Delhi

12:01AM GMT 30 Dec 2006

Hundreds of India's most revered Hindu holy men are threatening a mass suicide at one of the world's largest religious festivals next month in protest at the pollution of the Ganges, India's most sacred water course.

The threat comes as about six million pilgrims prepare to attend the three-month Ardh Kumb festival where devotees queue to take a "holy dip" in the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna, the site where the mythical Sarasvati river was said to have flowed, outside Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, north India. Pressure on the government to clean up the river, which devout Hindus revere as a goddess with healing powers, has been mounting ahead of the festival which begins on Wednesday.

Last month a swami, a holy man, had to be rescued from the Ganges after an attempted suicide which, local reports said, had been carried out "in despair" at the state of the river.

The threatened protests, which were announced at a joint meeting of holy men and religious teachers in Allahabad last month, echo the mass hunger-strike of 2001 which was only called off after local authorities issued promises — never to be fulfilled — to clean up the river.

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Attempts to clean up the Ganges have been on-going since 1985 when the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, made it a personal mission to rid the river of sewage and industrial effluents.

However, despite spending more than £150 million on several action plans over the past 20 years, the levels of untreated sewage in the river continue to rise, posing a serious risk to pilgrims from fecal coliform bacteria.

Prof Veer Bhadra Mishra, a hydraulics engineer named among Time magazine's "heroes of the planet" for his efforts to clean up the Ganges, said that government incompetence and lethargy were at the root of the problem.

More than 350 million people live on the banks of the Ganges which runs for more than 1,500 miles from its source in the high Himalayas down to the Bay of Bengal, passing through 29 cities with populations of more than 100,000 people.

"The Ganges's fate is to be neglected and left to die," Prof Mishra said in the holy city of Varanasi. "The government has failed in all its efforts."

Analysts say that the government is unequal to the scale of the problem which involves a billion litres of untreated human waste pouring into the river every day, along with chemical effluents from tanning and fertilizer factories.

Current predictions say sewage levels will double by 2020 unless rapid action is taken to build an effective sewer network.

In Varanasi the government built two water treatment plants but, says Prof Mishra, both have been rendered inoperable because of high maintenance costs and breaks in the electricity supply.

Last month Thiru Raja, India's environment minister, estimated that £800 million was needed to clean up the river — money which the government does not have.

Prof Mishra said: "The Ganges is so sacred to Hindus. The government can collect the money from them. The problem is not money but will."